The present invention relates to electronic medical record (EMR) systems and in particular to an EMR system allowing access to and entry of data by a patient to request and schedule appointments and medical resources for the patient.
Scheduling of medical providers, equipment, laboratory services, and other resources for patient appointments is a significant challenge in efficiently controlling medical resources and costs. Typically, scheduling is controlled by employees in a clinic or other medical facility, who communicate with the patients by phone and arrange the schedules manually. While, in some cases, these employees can arrange all of the resources required for a visit, frequently patients are required to schedule multiple procedures in a series of tests through a series of phone calls to different employees handing scheduling for related, but separate, facilities. Such arrangements can be time consuming and inefficient, both for the patients and the medical facilities.
Enlisting patients as active participants in their own healthcare can increase patient satisfaction and the quality of the healthcare experience while decreasing the cost of providing that care. One area in which patient satisfaction can be dramatically improved, therefore, is in providing greater control and easier access for the patient to request and schedule appointments for medical care. Providing such control to the patient also affords benefits to the medical facilities, as when scheduling is done by the patient, there is a reduced need for scheduling personnel.
As it is desirable to allow patients access to scheduling of their procedures in order to improve efficiency, a number of medical communities have used the Internet to allow patients to directly schedule appointments. These systems, however, have not proved to be particularly efficient for a number of reasons. First, known scheduling systems typically provide scheduling capabilities only in predetermined increments of time. These systems, therefore, cannot tailor the amount of time necessary for an appointment to the reason for the appointment, and therefore are not efficient in scheduling the time of medical personnel and resources.
Furthermore, when patients schedule their own appointments, it is difficult for medical personnel to obtain necessary information from and provide necessary information to the patient prior to the visit. Therefore, for example, patients can arrive for appointments, and spend up to an hour filling out forms prior to meeting with a doctor. Additionally, as the medical practitioner does not know the reason for the visit prior to the arrival of the patient, the medical practitioner cannot prepare for the visit by providing instructions to the patient prior to the visit. This problem is particularly acute when evaluation of a medical problem requires multiple steps, such as, for example, laboratory work prior to meeting with a medical practitioner. Inadequate information, therefore, often results in return visits, which could have been easily avoided had sufficient information been available to both the patient and the physician.